K is for Ka Boom

This truly was another great Brennert story, Ka Boom fits perfectly with this story. It’s the all-American story and nail wraps.

This look of the 30s through the early 70s was absolutely intriguing. The characters all stood out regardless of their capacity. The park itself was a main feature from the get go. In this story it is almost hard to tell who was the main character, Eddie or Toni, but they both carried the story forward and took me on a journey of a lifetime. Wars, high diving, first loves, equality fights, divorces, and finding ones happiness in life. There was a huge lesson in the book that I heard loud and clear and it was to always follow your dreams. I love strong women main characters and Toni sure was fierce and determined. My kind of girl. Her father, Eddie, was an amazing man, and I’m so glad he got his happy ending. I can’t state enough how every character will stick with you and leave you thinking of them as time passes.

Summary:
Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey—especially for seven-year-old Antoinette, who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni, and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka, at the stand where they sell homemade French fries amid the roar of the Cyclone roller coaster. There is also the lure of the world’s biggest salt-water pool, complete with divers whose astonishing stunts inspire Toni, despite her mother’s insistence that girls can’t be high divers.

But a family of dreamers doesn’t always share the same dreams, and then the world intrudes: There’s the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor, which hits home in ways that will split the family apart; and perils like fire and race riots in the park. Both Eddie and Jack face the dangers of war, while Adele has ambitions of her own—and Toni is determined to take on a very different kind of danger in impossible feats as a high diver. Yet they are all drawn back to each other—and to Palisades Park—until the park closes forever in 1971.

Evocative and moving, with the trademark brilliance at transforming historical events into irresistible fiction that made Alan Brennert’s Moloka’i and Honolulu into reading group favorites, Palisades Park takes us back to a time when life seemed simpler—except, of course, it wasn’t.